Tagged Questions

Questions in this tag must be answered in a manner that can be understood by a general audience with at most a basic understanding of physics, mathematics and related sciences. Apply it to questions where the asker clearly requests such answers.

From the lessons on QM, I got impression that there are some discrete orbitals that emit light when electron drops from one to another. Specific molecules emit light in very narrow bands, therefore. ...

Why did scientists need to invent light years? What's so important about having a light year? I have been learning that a light year is $9.461 \times 10^{15} \, \mathrm{m}$. My question is, why are ...

My family will buy a car, so to minimise the car's air conditioning and heating (and thus fuel) costs, how should we choose a car exterior's colour and the interior's colour and material (eg fabric ...

If everyone on earth except one person were to gather up in one location, say the North Pole, and jump at the exact same time and stay airborne for about 1.5 sec. And that one person who did not jump ...

Without a doubt, Stephen Hawking is the most famous living scientist; indeed, his public visibility in all of history seems to be rivaled only by Einstein and easily eclipses giants of physics such as ...

Inspired by this answer to a question on Puzzling.SE (which contains the old but wrong idea that the Coriolis force determines the direction in which a bathroom vortex rotates, and also an approach ...

Imagine you could use all of the energy you have ever extracted from your food as a source of propulsion. Is the energy contained in the food you’ve eaten over the course of your lifetime enough to ...

A physics professor talked in a YouTube video about a paper he and his colleagues published. The paper presents a model that ties the mass of particles to the size of the universe. He summarizes their ...

I have just watched a trailer for the upcoming movie Interstellar and started to wonder about some physics involved. In the end of the trailer, they are obviously plunging into a Black hole hoping to ...

In this question, I hypothesise an event that affects the entire bus; I'm not asking about menace unique to upper floor passengers, such as an overly high upper floor or hanging objects (because this ...

In some cases, we can enable the Night Mode (reversing the bright and dark color of the display; such as White Text, Black Background) for the screen display.
LCD(Liquid-crystal display) seems to be ...

Layman here so I'm hoping for an answer for my query that doesn't involve math.
I'm reading about inflation and how it solves the flatness and horizon problems. I get that the horizon problem deals ...

My friend is an instructor at an outdoor adventure centre which has lots of zip wires. The instructor's harness has a shorter line that attaches to the zip wire than the normal harness does and she ...

When you put a duvet cover in a washing machine without buttoning it up any other items of bedding (e.g. pillow cases) inevitably end up inside it. Instinctively, I would think that the opposite would ...

I got this question from playing games like Halo and Borderlands (I know kinda dumb but raised a good question) in which the primary protection is an electric shield. Now I'm wondering if it would be ...

I have just read curious statement on this website: http://www.trinitas.ru/rus/doc/0016/001d/00162241.htm (unfortunately this is in Russian, but I will try to translate)
"В заключение можно отметить, ...

I've seen many science popularisation documentaries and read few books (obviously not being scientist myself). I am able to process and understand basic ideas behind most of these. However for general ...

Why are 11 dimensions needed in M-Theory? The four I know (three spatial ones plus time) have an intuitive meaning in everyday life. How can I think of the other seven? What is their nature (spatial, ...

I am a science fiction writer.
I know how to time travel to the future (using black hole or speed). But I need to argue in my novel that time travel to the past might not be possible. Is there a way ...

I was reading through Stephen Hawking's explanation of two - dimensional space. In that he mentioned that it will be very difficult to design a living being that could exist only in 2 dimension. What ...